Friday, March 10, 2017

At the least, it’s good for business. For the therapy
business, that is. As America, Great Britain and other nations have gotten
themselves mired in what Frank Furedi called a “therapy culture” everyone’s
problems have become medicalized. And we pretend that science can solve all problems and that we need to worship at the altar of the goddess Athena.

Instead of facing problems or
trying to solve dilemmas, we rush off to therapy and try to get in touch with
our feelings. Since the activity can only aggravate one’s problems,
the therapy culture will prescribe… more therapy. Can't anyone recognize a racket when they see it?

People, especially college students have not been encouraged
to work on their problems. They have not been offered help in adjusting to new
social conditions. They have been taught to see themselves as potential or
actual therapy patients. They have been traumatized; they are vulnerable; they
are victims; they need to be coddled; they need to receive mucho empathy; they
need to get in touch with their feelings; they need therapy. If not therapy,
certainly they need medication.

Strangely enough, for all the progress that we have made in
the medical treatment of depression, especially with SSRIs, young people, in
particular, seem to be drowning in emotional distress.

In a recent article for The American Interest, Furedi
describes how the therapy culture has invaded universities:

Since
the 1960s, universities have been in the forefront of promoting theories and
practices that encourage people to interpret their anxieties, distress, and
disappointment through the language of psychological deficits. Until recently,
however, how students and faculty coped with their existential problems remained
a personal matter. Today, the therapeutic outlook pervades campus culture so
thoroughly that it influences how courses are taught, which topics are
discussed, and how verbal exchanges are regulated. Teaching, some educators
believe, can be trauma inducing, and so they have adopted an explicit
“trauma-informed perspective.”

This has happened, Furedi continues, because our traditional
values have broken down. The customs and rituals that informed our culture have
been discredited and discarded. In their place students are being cast in a guilt narrative where we are
divided into oppressors and victims, abusers and trauma victims. See which role
suits you best, and act accordingly. Of course, this gives everyone a common
meaning, but at the cost of making people less able to deal with life.

Furedi writes:

Western
societies have become ever more uneasy with the values and behavioral codes of
the past, and ever more open to alternative ways of giving meaning to human
experience. Since the 1960s, the erosion of common webs of meaning, through
which communities deal with the uncertainties of existence, has indeed created
a demand for a new etiquette.

It isn’t just the thought that counts, Furedi explains. Today’s
culture warriors are imposing new customs and behaviors, a new code of
etiquette:

The
objective of re-socialization through altering the norms that undergraduates
grew up with is now actively pursued by universities through the imposition of
language codes, rules of conduct, and workshops and campaigns oriented toward
discrediting students’ values by “raising awareness” about their supposed
defects. If this sounds a little like the “consciousness raising” presumptions
of the Sixties, that’s because the “long march through the institutions” is not
just a slogan.

In the past people who had social problems. They might
have had difficulty adapting to a new community. Now, these have become medical
problems. As I said, it’s good for the therapy business. But, since science cannot tell you what you should do, it cannot set your moral bearings.

Furedi writes:

Once
everyday life is interpreted through a medicalized idiom, the meaning of
pressure and stress often acquires a pathological dimension. Feelings and
emotions that were once considered unexceptional can acquire a more threatening
dimension in a medicalized culture. What Lukianoff and Haidt describe as a
“greater willingness to seek help” is itself actively promoted as a virtue in a
medicalized setting.

He continues:

The
representation of existential problems as medical ones has an important
influence on the way individuals perceive their health. The relationship
between the medicalized narrative of wellbeing and its impact is a dialectical
one, in that it does not simply frame the way people are supposed to feel and
behave; it also constitutes an invitation to being “not well.” That is why the
sensibility of being “not well” has today become part of many people’s
identity.

And yet, medicalizing and psychologizing the problems,
pretending that they can be solved through science deracinates people,
depriving them of their moral sense and their moral grounding. They turn everyone
into a mental health provider or consumer. Once mental illness is the norm, young people in
particular will be more likely to conform to the new norm… and will not only recognize their neurosis or narcissism or personality
disorders… they will be more likely to contract these disorders.

Would it not be better if students were capable of taking
some simple advice? Would it not be better if they were encouraged to deal with
the problems and dilemmas that are part of everyday life?

The
problem is not the banal exhortation to relax, or to stay focused, which could
be acquired for free from any sensible parent, friend, or clergyman. It is the
application of a medical label to a very normal condition, and the consequent
artificial professionalization of the advice. The unstated corollary of this
labeling is the assumption that sitting and preparing for an examination may be
harmful to your wellbeing, whatever that term has come to mean.

And also,

That
the 21st-century version of personhood communicates a narrative that
continually raises doubts about people’s emotional capacity to deal with
physical and emotional harms. The transformation of distress into a condition
of emotional injury has as its premise the belief that people are extremely
fragile in the face of the vicissitudes of everyday life.

p.s. I like psychologist Jordan Peterson's "Rules for living" offered to his students I believe. I found a copy here.http://wildnessliesinwait.tumblr.com/post/44611942303/dr-jordan-petersons-rules-for-living

I like many, like these seem generally useful in all conditions.6. Pay attention.32. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.33. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.39. Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.40. Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

But some need context, like this one. I'd always prefer to do things when no one is looking, so being seen seems the harder task, and necessary if you want to be a leader.5. If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.

And I'm sure Stuart would have reservations on the first one, at least maybe not the whole truth like unsolicited opinions.1. Tell the truth.While this one is more clear:3. Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.

On simple advice, perhaps I'd add:41. To thine own self be true, but don't hide behind the tapestry like a rat.